went out of him. ‘So. To return to my original question. What are our tasks today? My turn to give you the answer. Our first task today is to give no thought to the morrow.’
I took his advice, for that day at least. I did things I had not been giving myself permission to do, for they were not the serious tasks that provided against the morrow, but the simple work that brought me pleasure. I worked on my inks, not to take to market and sell for coin, but to try to create a true purple for my own pleasure. It yielded no success that day; all my purples turned to brown as they dried, but it was a work I enjoyed. As for the Fool, he amused himself by carving on my furniture. I glanced up at the sound of my kitchen knife scraping across wood. The movement caught his eye. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized at once. He held the knife up between two fingers to show me, and then carefully set it down. He got up from his chair and wandered over to his saddlepack. After a moment of digging, he tugged out a roll of fine bladed tools. Humming to himself, he went back to the table and set to on the chairs. He went bare-fingered to his task, tugging off the fine glove that usually masked his Skill-hand. As the day progressed, my simple chairs gained leafy vines twining up their backs, and occasional little faces peeping out of the foliage.
When I looked up from my work in mid-afternoon, I saw him come in with chunks of seasoned wood from my woodpile. I leaned back from my desk to watch him as he turned and considered each one, studying them and tracing their grain with his Skill-fingers as if he could read their secrets hidden from my eyes. At length he selected one with a knee in it and started in on it. He hummed to himself as he worked, and I left him to it.
Nighteyes woke once during the day. He clumped down from my bed with a sigh and tottered outside. I offered him food when he returned but he turned his nose up at it. He had drunk deeply, all the water he could hold, and he lay himself down with a sigh on the cool floor of the cabin. He slept again, but not as deeply.
And so I passed that day in pleasure, which is to say, in the sort of work I wanted to do rather than the work that I thought I ought to be doing. Chade came often to my mind that day. I wondered, as I seldom had before, at how the old assassin had passed his long hours and days up in his isolated tower before I had come to be his apprentice. Then I sniffed disdainfully at that image of him. Long before I had arrived, Chade had been the royal assassin, bearing the King’s Justice in the form of quiet work wherever it needed to go. The sizeable library of scrolls in his apartments and his endless experiments with poisons and deadly artifice were proof that he had known how to occupy his days. And he had had the welfare of the Farseer reign to give him a purpose in life.
Once, I, too, had shared that purpose. I had shrugged free of it to have a life of my own. Odd, that in the process I had somehow wrenched myself free of the very life I had thought to have to myself. To gain the freedom to enjoy my life, I had severed all connections with that old life. I had lost contact with all who had loved me and all I had loved.
That wasn’t the complete truth, but it suited my mood. An instant later, I realized I was wallowing in self-pity. My last three attempts at a purple ink were drying to brown, though one did have a very nice shade of rose to the brown. I set aside that scrap of paper, after making notes on it as to how I had got the colour. It would be good ink for botanical illustrations, I thought.
I unfolded my legs from my chair and rose, stretching. The Fool looked up from his work. ‘Hungry?’ I asked him.
He considered a moment. ‘I could eat. Let me cook. The food you make fills the stomach but does little more than that.’
He set aside the figurine he was working on. He saw me glance at it, and covered it, almost jealously. ‘When I’m finished,’ he promised, and began a purposeful ransacking of my cupboards. While he was tsk-ing over my lack of any interesting spices, I wandered outside. I crossed the stream, which could have led me gently down to the beach. Idly I walked up the hill, past both horse and pony grazing freely. At the crest of the hill I walked more slowly until I reached my bench. I sat down on it. Only a few steps away, the grassy hill gave way to sudden slate cliffs and the rocky beach below them. Seated on my bench, all I could see was the wide vista of ocean spread out before me. Restlessness walked through my bones again. I thought of my dream of the boy and the hunting cat out in the night and smiled to myself. Run away from it all, the cat had urged the boy, and the thought had all my sympathy.
Yet, years ago, that was what I had done, and this was what it had brought me. A life of peace and self-sufficiency, a life that should have satisfied me; yet, here I sat.
A time later, the Fool joined me. Nighteyes, too, came at his heels, to lie down at my feet with a martyred sigh. ‘Is it the Skill-hunger?’ the Fool asked with quiet sympathy.
‘No,’ I replied, and almost laughed. The hunger he had unknowingly waked in me yesterday was temporarily crippled by the elfbark I had consumed. I might long to Skill, but right now my mind was numbed to that ability.
‘I’ve put dinner to cook slow over a little fire, to keep from driving us out of the house. We’ve plenty of time.’ He paused, and then asked carefully, ‘And after you left the Old Blood folk, where did you go?’
I sighed. The wolf was right. Talking to the Fool did help me to think. But perhaps he made me think too much. I looked back through the years and gathered up the threads of my tale.
‘Everywhere. When we left there, we had no destination. So we wandered.’ I stared out across the water. ‘For four years, we wandered, all through the Six Duchies. I’ve seen Tilth in winter, when snow but a few inches deep blows across the wide plains but the cold seems to go down to the earth’s very bones. I crossed all of Farrow to reach Rippon, and then walked on to the coast. Sometimes I took work as a man, and bought bread, and sometimes the two of us hunted as wolves and ate our meat dripping.’
I glanced over at the Fool. He listened, his golden eyes intent on my story. If he judged me, his face gave no sign of it.
‘When we reached the coast, we took ship north, although Nighteyes did not enjoy it. I visited Bearns Duchy in the depth of one winter.’
‘Bearns?’ He considered that. ‘Once, you were promised to Lady Celerity of Bearns Duchy.’ The question was in his face but not his voice.
‘That was not of my will, as you recall. I did not go there to seek out Celerity. But I did glimpse Lady Faith, Duchess of Bearns, as she rode through the streets on her way to Ripplekeep Castle. She did not see me, and if she had, I am sure she would not have recognized the ragged wanderer as Lord FitzChivalry. I hear that Celerity married rich in both love and lands, and is now the Lady of Ice Towers near Ice Town.’
‘I am glad for her,’ the Fool said gravely.
‘And I. I never loved her, but I admired her spirit, and liked her well enough. I am glad of her good fortune.’
‘And then?’
‘I went to the Near Islands. From there, I wished to make the long crossing to the Out Islands, to see for myself the land of the folk who had raided and made us miserable for so long, but the wolf refused to even consider such a long sea journey.
‘So we returned to the mainland, and travelled south. We went mostly by foot though we took ship past Buckkeep and did not pause there. We journeyed down the coast of Rippon and Shoaks, and on beyond the Six Duchies. I didn’t like Chalced. We took ship from there just to get away from it.’
‘How far did you go?’ the Fool prompted when I fell silent.
I felt my mouth twist in a grin as I bragged, ‘All the way to Bingtown.’
‘Did
